Open the Pod Bay Door Playtesting

Five player game which means 10 turns and two rounds. Playing without the B.I.L supplement. But with the changes that put success or failure at the end of the wait instead of at the same time the player says the character will attempt it. Two players have never played games like this before. This is how the story unwinds:

Lt. Commander Michelle decides that she’s going to work with Ruhan on a solution to hack into the Appleseed’s computer so that they can dock without issue. She’s tied up for three rounds.

Meanwhile, Janya the Navy Seal and Akio the unpaid intern are in engineering trying to rewire the computer to help hack into the Appleseed’s computer as well. The unpaid intern tries to rewire and causes a fire which forces Janya to attempt to put it out. It’s going to take one turn before we know whether or not the fire extinguisher works.

Meanwhile, Kirima the engineer decides to try and pilot the pod close to the Appleseed, which he believes he can dock, but he isn’t trained in piloting, so it’s going to take 4 turns before we know how that works out for him.

Therefore, with the fire out and Kirima trying to pilot, the unpaid intern decides to run to the bridge to get Ruhan the computer expert to help him and Janya. Because he’s an unpaid intern we decide that he might fail at getting to the bridge, but since its an unpaid interns job is to fetch coffee, we decide that it’s part of his job. It’s going to take one turn. We also find out that Michelle successfully found a way to hack into the Appleseed.

Meanwhile, the intern fails to get to the bridge and tripped. On the bridge, Ruhan is going to use Michelle’s hack to get into the Appleseed via a backdoor. It will take two turns.

But air is running out, so Misa the exobiologists, who made first contact with aliens on a nearby planet contacts the aliens to talk to them about bringing O2 up so the pod doesn’t run out of air. It’s going to take two turns.

Meanwhile, Kirima finishes and rolls for success and fails, and because he was piloting the ship and it crashes into the Appleseed. Everyone must roll to see if they die….

….the entire crew perishes in the crash.

Playtest notes: it’s too deadly, so we change it to 50/50 chance of life/death. We would have had a few characters alive after the crash if we had played with that rule.

We also discovered that it’s much harder to track the success/failure with the rule changes. We liked the suspense that it created, but it’s much simpler to roll for success when you roll for the time that action will take.